It is quite hard to make a choice for a feature to write about. So many to talk about. And almost every day another favorite of the month. Sliding time windows. The Oracle Developer Community – well, that is us. All developers working with Oracle technology, sharing experiences and ideas, helping each other with inspiration and solutions to challenges, making each other and ourselves better. Sharing fun and frustration, creativity and best practices, desires and results. Powered by OTN now kown as ODC. Where we can download virtually any software Oracle has to offer. And find resources – from articles and forum answers to documentation and sample code. This article is part of the community effort to show appreciation – to the community and to the Orace Developer Community (organization).

And the WayBack machine is just one of many examples of timelines – presentation of data organized by date. We all know how pictures say more than many words. And how tables of data are frequently to much less accessible to users than to the point visualizations. For some reason, data associated with moments in time have always had special interest for me. As do features that are about time – such as Flashback Query, 12c Temporal Database and SYSDATE (or better yet: SYSTIMESTAMP).

To present such time-based data in way that reveals the timeline and historical threat that resides in the data, we can make use of the Timeline component that is available in:

Note that in all cases it does not take much more than a dataset with date (or date time) attribute and one or more attributes to create a label and perhaps to categorize. A simple select ename, job, hiredate from emp suffices.